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I don’t know why I approached this album with trepidation. Trepidation perhaps mixed with fear, heaviness… inquietude. A mirror, a memory of the storms of the past. You can’t talk about this Efrim Menuk without considering the output of his past, with the mythic Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the segue-band A Silver Mount Zion . Godspeed’s F#A#∞ was the crumbling, paranoiac headiness of pre-millenial Montreal set to a raggedy orchestra. Before the rents tripled in the Mile End and Plateau neighborhoods and the Grand Gentrifuckation slammed into the highest gear, Godspeed and ASMZ’ slow Wagnerian opuses evoking forgotten and crumbling nooks of industry and the former shmata sweatshops where immigrants (like my grandmama) toiled while the neighborhood ossified. Not only the sound of Godspeed but the legacy of their studio and label (Hotel2Tango & Constellation respectively) has, perhaps ironically, sparked a change of the very neighborhoods they chose to set their sad symphonies in. One can draw a direct line from Godspeed to The Arcade Fire and the avalanche of bands that followed their success. These days, the myth is running leaner as the pilgrim youth of Canadian indie rock are starting to leave in fits and starts, wayward “anglos” who made their way here over the last decade as cultural refugees from a seemingly more buckled down and conservative Canada following the pied piper promise of cheap rent, laissez-faire attitudes and the skein of romance that Montreal wore easily. Many find they can’t hack the glass-ceiling presented to the non-bilingual and go home, go elsewhere, leaving the locus of the creative community here chimeric and ever-changing. Some stay and manage to stitch themselves into the life here, which by nature is dealing with many fragmented identities, hustling to keep fed and dancing on the borders between the “two solitudes”.
I could preamble forever; an album such as this, with it’s many referents to where I’m from, carries with it all that subjective weight. Starting with the opener “our lady of parc extension and her munificent sorrows”, which drones majestically for 7 blissful minutes, laced with Menuk’s expert and sculptural grasp of wrecked guitar tone. The harmonic chanting brings to mind Spiritualized ’s finest moments, but I wish the lyrics were more discernible (I live in the hood known as parc extension and I wince at the title, a little.).
The protracted development continues with “a 12 pt program for keepin’ on” which paints in more obfuscating darkling shades, echoing vocals bouncing between modular synth sounding sample-and-hold white noise dribbled with electric hums and buzzes that open to reveal a nasty distorted drum machine near the end, perhaps and element the song was strong enough to do without? The album creaks along, with “august four, year-of-our-lord blues” and “heavy calls & hospitals blues” sounding like outtakes from Horses in the Sky era ASMZ.
One heart-wrender is “kaddish for chestnut”, a funeral lament/prayer for the Constellation-H2T affiliated genius Vic Chesnutt , who to the incredible sadness and loss of all took his own life last year. The song evolves slowly and though laden with emotion and weight, resolves into a hopeful and beautiful chant near it’s end. Penultimate closer “chickadee’s roar pt.2” is basically a soundscape/concrete piece that allows the brain to lapse into contemplation and take a big ol’ brain-breather on the psychedelic sunrise of finishing track “i am no longer a motherless child”, which lets the air in, you feel like you are shaking off the intensity of the previous night’s sorrow and darkness as it slowly evolves, building a spire of hope with it’s loose slow-jam optimistic blues inversion.
High Gospel is really a stellar, dark and majestic album that travels at it’s own measured pace and makes no apologies to anyone in it’s singularity of vision. I feel good, I feel relieved listening to it. Something is far too close to my history, to my present; I can’t even imagine someone who didn’t grow up here can hear this music and feel what I feel. I don’t mention this to be exclusionary or self-righteous, I’m being honest. This music pulls at some deep strings for me and feels as familiar and magical as the bricks of Hutchison street were from my childhood’s eyes. It reaches me as a musician, as a Montrealer and most triumphantly as a human.
